


Infra

by ladygrange



Category: Led Zeppelin
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Sex, and leslie jamison wrote in the recovering:, and the touch of another encourages vagal activity, as they said in hebrew, attenuates pain, because because.”, calm originates in relation to fair weather, for no earthly reason:, from cauma, it speaks to the heart and lungs and digestive system, protects the body against stress, resounds from childhood into adulthood, the vagus nerve stretches from the brainstem and wanders down to the abdomen, with each measured exhalation the vagus nerve slows the heart gently, “he taught me the notion of love bestowed stam, “heat of the midday sun, ” referring to a time of day in italy when everything rests and is still
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-22 12:22:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 8,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30038646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladygrange/pseuds/ladygrange
Summary: a companion piece to Pb
Relationships: Jimmy Page/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 10





	1. Car

Emma has not driven in quite some time. Uneasiness would clutch her, would take hold of her feet and turn her to an unwilling driver. An even more unwilling passenger. The hidden, narrow tracks behind Plumpton offer steady, tangible signs: here the trees grow up in a cathedral, there the moat runs off in tendrils, and over to the left she could go into the village but she goes right. And Emma gets lost intentionally. Safely. 

When the sun sets and paints peach fire across the sky, she parks and sits, elbows bent towards the steering wheel. She nudges her shoes off on the floorboard and sits cross legged in the seat. She could get out. Ferns populate the ground in green tufts, evening wind sways them this way and that. The forest floor is dressed for June in generous blue wildflowers. Knotty saplings push out here and there, under great oaks and aged beeches. It is cooler there, under the shade, than in the car where sweat beads at her temples. She does not get out.

Instead, Emma rests her forehead on the steering wheel; the tepid breeze accompanying her movement sweeps her bare neck, hair much too long piled on top of her head. She’d meant to get it cut last week, for the first time in ages, but… But. 

The one thought stops all the other thoughts and the careful way she’d meant to keep such things at a distance. If she thought of that frantic call, it would rupture her momentary calm. She would worry again––“Sick,” Peter’s fraught voice had arrived with a vague crackle from across the Atlantic. “He’s just caught something, probably bad food, a virus. _No_ , he can’t talk.” 

Emma could go back. Walk around Plumpton, fretting and lost. Sleep lost after that. She could work in the attic, on that years long labor to get a home studio installed. Jimmy had ordered a Neve mixing console, plenty to wire and connect there. 

She could take the train to London to fritter and waste time on a few mixes for an up and coming group who is less than enthused at having a woman engineer their LP. The leather of the steering wheel creaks under her tightening grip; her knuckles whiten. When she takes a deep breath, her stomach meets her legs. The car is too hot, even her fingers sweat and slip.

Emma ends up in the kitchen––cool and dark, the oak table weathered from centuries of use. Knees drawn to her chest, she watches dust motes float in a high shaft of light. In here, a sort of blindness takes her, mute as a statue. Maybe she won’t take a Mandrax tonight, maybe the Seconal, with it’s thick, smothering calm. A distinct purr interrupts her thoughts; Humphrey winds around the legs of her chair. A pair of questioning blue eyes meet her. She smiles down and offers a hand.

“Hello, darling.”

She scoops Humphrey into her arms, and he promptly burrows for affection. He’s more plump than Basil, though both have ears, feet, and tails dipped in chocolate. After a few moments, Humphrey kneads her shirt in contentment, purring from deep in his belly

Basil is waiting. She knows it while scratching under Humphrey’s raised chin; he’s waiting for her to be upstairs like she usually is at this time. They tend to get lonely without each other. They pace and fuss. Jimmy's face, crinkly and dark with beard, blooms in her memory. _Pairs,_ he’d said to her that day, with two Siamese cats in arm, _so they can keep each other company_. Basil had taken to Jimmy instantly, had taken to napping in his spinny chair, in front of the reel to reels, while Humphrey favors her. 

A smile tweaks her lips. Humphrey jumps gracefully from her hold, and stretches from one pointed ear to his back leg––soft arrow leading to bed. _Come on now, it’s time._


	2. Garden

Bits of sunlight cast and throw on the rippling water of the moat. It’s an evening sun, still quite bright. Swans glide and curve towards the bulrushes; a few have begun molting, patches of their discarded feathers float lazily to the shoreline. They are searching for stonewort and tadpoles to eat before bed. She tried to find them once, a few years ago when Plumpton was still a novelty, a place of endless curiosity. She’d gone out with a torch Jimmy kept in the bedside table. But she had not found it, the swan’s sleeping place. So dark they must’ve blended into the night, into the black and silky waters. 

She has decided against the routine drive in favor of walking. Hours of it now. She passes striped pastel patio furniture and vines of runaway yellow honeysuckle in the bushes, and finally she sits on the grass sloping towards the water. Toes her shoes off. Better this way, lying down, eyes closed, her body at a temporary rest. 

Emma twirls blades of grass between her fingers and relents to the inertia of the day.

The ticker tape of bad news proceeds, heedless of a calm evening, the faint sweetness of honeysuckle, of two cats tussling nearby.

In April: Cincinnati gatecrashers, then fires in Oklahoma City. In May: crowds met with water cannons. Security atop security, someone posted outside each hotel door. Eyelids squeezed tight, she glimpses white pins and pricks. 

Peter on the phone. 

She’d made it the whole day without thinking of it––she’d executed many circles round the moat, had forced lunch, had dipped her toes in the water, had not thought of it, had done quite well with instructions for the gardener, a few mundane calls. A whole day. Not thinking. 

Peter’s voice had itched between irritation and worry. “We’ve already postponed the first month, then all those bloody rumors of splitting up. Now don’t go running your mouth to anybody, if anyone should come sniffing around you, not for any reason, understand? Could be after a quote.”

Her breath had left her in a stunned laugh. “Peter, I’ve got no intentions of _running my mouth_ to anybody, not that I have ever had that intention. I’d think the press have better things to do anyway.”

Peter had kept on, had muttered, “He’ll come round, always does, you know how the long ones go. Remember the one in ‘69, getting the LP together. He’ll come round…”

Emma’s holding her breath. Her lungs burn. She lets it go in a gentle hiss.

A flock of swallows fly overhead, their tail feathers in a distinct, streaming arch. They type and click to each other in the way swallows do, going to roost somewhere. 

Humphrey paws her knee. Dinner time. The sun slips away to the Western shoulders of the trees. 

She should take a bath, soothe the ache in her calves. She will tilt toward sleeps easier that way. She’s determined not to take another Mandrax like last night; the nausea wasn’t worth the instant sleep. And she always wakes with a dry mouth and a minute's confusion––back in Montreux, a body in pain. 

Humphrey nudges his head insistently under her palm. Basil has a few meows to say about it, two paws propped on her thigh. 

“Yes,” Emma murmurs. “We’ll go in now.”

She ends up on a short couch surrounded by the tangled greenery of potted plants: a variegated spider plant curls out of its pot and into the overgrown weeping fig, thick stalks like crossed fingers; a kentia palm leans heavily with new growth that the cats take great pleasure in attacking, and hanging overhead, a cast iron plant, leaves arching and shiny and indestructible. She’d picked them out long ago, at Pangbourne. Her body settles easier in the cushions, settles easier in that memory. Two cats nestle in the curvature of her knees and ankles. Two deep purrs, rhythmic and content interplay with night’s silence. All of them are tucked in a placket of windows made of old, warped glass. 

Lying down, looking through the fronds of leaves, the moon hangs full and bright. Waxing. He’d exchange the meanderings of the day and the week with her, voice drifting with yawns, fingers sifting. The lull of his body against hers. She thinks of going––ticket, plane, flight, a familiar checklist. But what could she bring him anyway. The legs this time around are jam packed with dates, little time for much else. 

She sinks deeper into the pillow she’d brought from their bed. She finds restless sleep for a few hours before she gives in to the call of Mandrax.


	3. Call

With both hands firmly on each reel, Emma rocks the tape slowly across the playback head, listening for the slowed downbeat of the drums––a muffled heartbeat, like a sonogram. Andy taught her to listen for distinct noises, to find edits that way and then, carefully, mark the tape with a white grease pencil. The pinch roller locks into place, the tape reverses, and she listens again to make sure. She’s deft with the razor blade, slicing tape at a steep angle, pulling tape from the takeup reel, and slicing again. She discards the bits in between. Now to splice.

The group is on break, Emma’s been here since breakfast. Blue adhesive joins two ends of tape and she uses her fingernail to work air bubbles from the seal. Andy’s voice is clear in her mind as it was the first time she’d done this: Don’t worry too much. It’ll all come out of the wash, I promise. 

The song plays seamlessly from one take to the next. Editing is always a kind of magic, a rush in her smile. A job well done.

Emma’s stomach grumbles but she ignores it––she’s _here_ , engrossed in the rhythm of the work. The stack of gash reels, labelled carefully, the empty reels waiting. The console beside her, gains and faders and EQ set right. 

At this rate, she might have a stereo master by the end of the day. 

It doesn’t matter that the band was a bit sloppy, she knows her task is to get the sounds down as best she can. And it doesn’t matter that they’ll likely not be back after this break. She likes the studio best at night, knows everybody there at night. Tape slaps the takeup reel as it spins off. She initials on her take sheet. Almost done. 

“Emma.”

She startles. 

“Didn’t mean to scare you.” Eddie grins and nods backward. “There’s a call for you down the hall. Said it’s urgent.”


	4. Tunnel

Steam wisps from the tarmac; New York is more humid than Emma remembers and it makes her skin uncomfortably sticky. A heaviness like oncoming rain weights the air. The flight attendant waves her down the steps. 

A double paged ad flickers in her mind’s eye: “Concerts West apologizes, and is so sorry for the humiliation and inconvenience to you and your faithful fans at Tampa Stadium.”

Another paper rustles in her bag, declaring without doubt: “What happened last night was the fault of Led Zeppelin. We tried to tell them the rain would blow over.”

“Emma!”

It’s Robert, shouldering his way through LaGuardia’s crowded entry, unbuttoned shirt tucked into his jeans, a cigarette burning in his mouth.

Emma’s stunned and momentarily stopped in her tracks, passerby bumping her shoulders. 

“What are you doing here?” she half laughs.

Robert smiles and takes her bag, leaning in to kiss her cheek.

“Needed to stretch my legs.”

Robert’s parked illegally, she notes. They fold themselves into a very small and very polished Jaguar. She forces a deep breath. 

“You’re not peeved are you?” he teases.

“Not at all,” Emma says. Offers him another smile. “Just didn’t expect you is all.”

“Thought Peter would’ve told you on the phone.”

“He wasn’t very forthcoming…” She trails off, traffic encloses them like anxiety to her throat. “I didn’t know you could drive over here, to be completely honest. Or that you’d be awake.”

Robert chuckles but glances over at her fists balled in her lap. 

“Alright over there?”

“Mm, fine.” Two tight syllables that wouldn’t fool a child. Emma reprimands herself for this brittle string holding her shoulders too close. For the way she aches to be off the freeway and out of the passenger seat.

“Might hit a patch of rain,” Robert says, as if he’s trying for conversation but only gets halfway. 

Rhodes sits between them, on the narrow leather console where Robert’s arms rests, grip tight over the gearshift. Each time Emma commands herself to calm, her muscles protest further.

“The Plaza’s not far,” Robert offers.

“I know.” She smiles tightly. “I really am fine, Robert. Just a bit preoccupied.”

He nods, merges left. “The flight okay?”

“It was a bit busy.”

Busy mind, hands empty, she’d flown without sleep, with nerves stampeding on every pathway. Hours across the Atlantic and she’d cursed herself for not insisting to talk to Jimmy. 

They’ve slowed to a crawl.

Pink cherry trees bloom in a busy park on her side; they dust the grass like candy floss. The swings are nearly empty. Only a few stragglers mingle about in bright pockets of raincoats and primary colors that break the gray wash of the buildings and the steely water in the distance. 

“Have you talked to him?”

Emma looks at Robert fully for the first time, a tired set to his eyes, on his third cigarette while they wait their turn at the tollbooth. 

“No,” she says, shaking her head. It’s an effort to swallow a frantic series of questions. “Peter only said Tampa went badly, that there was a riot, that the tickets got printed wrong. People got hurt.”

Robert rolls down his window to pass change to the teller. They file in line to the upcoming tunnel under the East river.

“Saw you’d read the papers.” He nods to the backseat.

Emma doesn’t need to confirm. Fluorescent light glares off the white tile of the tunnel. Robert shifts in his seat and nibbles his lip.

“You know we thought,” he breaks off and shifts in his seat again, passing her an apologetic smile. “Leg bothers me if I sit a certain way. Thing is, we thought we’d be back on after a tick, once the rain let up.”

“Rob,” she stops him. “You really don’t need to––.”

“No, I want to. I want to.” He’s caught in the rush of his words, and the tunnel stretches out and cars whiz past. “I don’t know why fans toss firecrackers and bottles. You know Jimmy got hit by one of them a week ago.”

Her heart squeezes. “I didn’t know–”

“I firecracker, I mean. We try to play what they want to hear, to keep the peace and keep things from going to shit.” Frustration drives him and the car speeds up. “What we are trying to put across is positive and wholesome.” 

“I know,” Emma says, her legs ache from pressing down into the floorboard. “I know it is.”

He’s smoked down to the filter, fist tight on the wheel. 

Emma imagines Jimmy pacing the carpet, the perimeter of his room, tracing and retracing his thoughts. Fiddling with the scarab necklace he’d become so fond of. 

A part of her races forward. She wants to get out of the smoky car, into the Plaza, and find Jimmy. She wants to molt those anxious thoughts. Pluck them and leave them in the water and work quickly, gracefully towards the shore. But the road is clogged with other vehicles and all Emma can do is chastise herself for her unsteadiness. Quite stupid to get out at this very moment, when driving is faster, more convenient, and sane. She should’ve taken a Seconal before the flight touched down.

“People miss the meaning of it sometimes,” Robert says, so quiet she almost misses it.

Rain strikes the windshield the instant the car emerges from the tunnel. He flicks the end of his cigarette out the window.

Robert laughs unexpectedly, jolting her. He turns the wipers to their quickest speed.

“We’ll bloody get through it, mind you. I was cold with fright the first few gigs.” He scrubs his face with one hand. “Everybody’s keeping to themselves right now.”

Emma nods but the rest of her feels oddly remote. On pause. She can’t quite reach a proper response. She keeps her eyes glued to the window, trying desperately to keep her nerves from surging out––Jimmy, the car, the dozens of things she doesn’t know.

“Christ,” he says. “I’ve got you more worried than you already were, haven’t I?”

She waves that away. “No, not at all, Robert.” A smile curves one side of her mouth. “You’ve never been a man of few words.”

They reach midtown, driving parallel to the river, tail lights smudged in the pouring rain. Robert takes a turn. 

“Maureen thinks I’ve given it to the little ones, says I’m half the reason they’re naughty.”

Emma grins big this time. “I’m sure she’s right.”

A measure of relief finds her at the sight of the Plaza’s ornate sign. Across from them, more cherry trees weep blooms and tremor in the wind. 

Robert pulls up to the valet but makes no move to get out. He tugs at the ends of his hair nervously. Emma reaches for her bag and his hand follows her elbow. At her questioning look, he says,

“It was good to see you, after, you know.” He clears his throat. “After everything.”

Memory floods Emma, puts a throb behind her breastbone. Time compresses from that day in Rhodes to where she sits now, such a small distance, such a different car, different roads, different smash up. She squeezes his wrist; it wasn’t anybody’s fault.

“It was good to see you, too.”


	5. Room(s)

“…should’ve been here by now, ages ago. At least by nine.”

With one hand clenching the headset, the other hooked around the body of the rotary, Jimmy stands rigid at the windows. He doesn’t hear her entry, the carpet mutes her steps. Rain shushes against the glass. He continues, voice clipped.

“Have you been listening to me? She gets nervy in the car, and it’s bad out, absolutely pouring.”

Jimmy pauses to listen to the reply. She doesn’t need to see the front of his trousers to know the knees of his Landlubbers are giving out; all that sitting and standing and pacing and repeating.

“Yes,” he says curtly, shoulder blades tightening the fabric of his shirt. “Yes, yes all right. You’ll let me know.”

She raises her hand to his back. The rotary clatters and rings to the floor. She slides her flat palm between his arm and his side, finding the gentle swell of his chest, the smooth, cool buttons of his shirt, the oval stone of his necklace, ringed with silver. His chest rises and falls quickly. Reflected vaguely back at her, his expression flexes between recognition and surprise. 

She rests her cheek between his shoulder blades. 

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she murmurs.

Jimmy covers her hands with one of his, presses hard, and lets his head drop a tad. 

“I thought maybe something had happened.”

She nuzzles her cheek against him. “No, darling. Nothing’s happened.”

The place memory lives rings loudly in her mind; a day not like today and one further down. She could be fooled with this doubling, with the pretty blue window panes of Montreux echoing distantly, that old fridge. The rented house in Germany. She closes her eyes and molds her body to his back and resolves not to think of it. 

“Will you sit with me?” she asks, bending down to place the handset on the cradle. The dial tone stops.

Swallows decorate the sofa, miniature and cerulean, carrying bits and bobs in their beaks. 

Jimmy lights a cigarette, the flame wavers, his breath wavers. He does not sit. She follows the disarray of his fringe, how it’s almost successful in distracting her from the sleepless bruises under his eyes. She follows his steps; bare feet, long toes peek from beneath the hems of his jeans. They’re frayed, in need of mending.

“We knew it was going to be good, the gig was going to be good, you see. The synchronicity was unbelievable. We still hoped we’d go back on.”

“Yes,” she says, willing him to sit. To stop.

“Peter’s been preoccupied, you know that. Gloria rings you, doesn’t she?”

Emma chews on her bottom lip and nods. “She’s trying to work out how they’ll divide time with the children.”

Jimmy reverses and walks the other way. He has his gaze trained on the floor, as if following a specific route that he cannot deviate from. 

“He’s in bits over the whole thing, and what with managing Bad Company, and the label…” he trails off with a wave of his hand. “Well, he’d sent Richard, bloody stupid thing to do, and the ticket said rain or shine. Did you know that?”

Jimmy looks up at her with incredulous eyes. 

“I did,” she says, “I thought it was unusual. Peter stays away from that sort of thing.”

“ _Exactly_.”

Jimmy pivots again. He stops at the table holding a radio, with antacids, a candle, and a few bottles of Heineken that refract jade light onto the wood’s surface. Stacked neatly are bottles of Dilaudid and Mandrax, exactly like the ones at the house. 

He turns on his heel again. She follows.

“But we’ve got to play, we’ve just got to. We’d go mad not playing.” Jimmy slows and ashes his cigarette. “It just became impossible. And they sent out one of those little planes, you know. To check the forecast.”

She wants to ask him if the firecracker injured him anywhere, if he’s got ringing ears. If he’d please stop, please sit. He takes another cigarette from the pack lying open on the coffee table before her. 

“And what did they find?” She forces the question out, flimsy as it is, not at all what she wants to ask.

“Bad weather.” The cigarette bounces with his words. “It was madness from the start, with the tarpaulin overhead, bowing in with water.”

Left a dozen steps. Right a dozen steps. 

“And when they announced it, that we couldn’t come back, apparently nobody could hear a thing. And of course that got built up into a drama, and every time, _every_ gig they have to bring in loads of security to intimidate the kids, fucking kids and it’s all in bits. But we tried, and it was going to be good, it was going to be good.” Jimmy swallows and holds her gaze for a split second, with distant and rattled eyes. “You believe me, don’t you?”

“I believe you,” she says, softly, urgently. “Come and sit, please. Sit with me.”

He doesn’t. He only stops, blows out a slow stream of smoke and looks toward the windows. 

“Do you remember the first time we played Stairway? In Belfast? And the kids, they got out lighters and held them up,” his voice has gone from raspy and quick to dreamlike. “I told you it looked like the Milky Way, that it had this mass feeling to it. You remember?”

She remembers: dots of light stitched into the darkness of the crowd. 

“People…” Jimmy starts, starts pacing again. “The barrier broke, which was unforgivable, and everybody surged. People got hurt, I don’t know how many, but they did.”

He reaches for another. There are cowboy shirts swathed in plastic covers from the dry cleaners, hanging in the open closet. There’s his red cardigan with the oversized, embroidered pockets on the arm of the couch. And there are ten packs to a carton, twenty cigarettes to a pack. Two hundred total. Her mother could smoke through a whole carton within a few days. Once, as a child, she’d reached for a can of coke, expecting a sip, instead getting crushed ends and muddy ash; she’d stood in the tub vomiting black. 

“Emmaline.” Jimmy steps around the coffee table to stand at her knee. He looks puzzled. “Are you listening?”

She clears her throat. “Yes, yes I’m listening.”

She could hook her hand around his knee and stop him from that goddamn pacing but he’s off again, quick running speech that drops into a near mumble at times. _It was going to be good._ And how could the ticket have said that. And they’ve been banned from Tampa. Persona non grata. A final judgement that cannot be displaced, even if they _did_ give hundreds of interviews and go on the telly. He’s lighting his fifth cigarette, or sixth, or her nerves are stretched from left to right and back again, over and over again. She can’t keep count. He’s laying into himself now, for whinging. She can’t pick up the threads. She squints and shakes her head. 

“Jim,” she interjects. “You’re not whinging. Come here for a sec.”

“No, I am, I am. First my wrist and then my fingers and it’s not even all that bad, especially after you’ve––” He stops himself sharply.

“After I’ve what?” she asks, wary and slow.

His eyes flicker towards her midsection - her ribs. An insistent visitor pounds at her throat: her heartbeat. Latent at Plumpton and at work, then muffled by sheer force of will in the car, and now wants its due. Past due.

She begins to stand. 

“No, don’t get up. Don’t.”

Jimmy stubs his cigarette out and cups her shoulders and presses her into the swallows. She has an awful feeling. A parched feeling. One that rises in her throat. She remembers taking Dilaudid for a week, maybe more: seven breathes into ten and the wave hits and everything's a relief. 

Jimmy retreats.

There should be footprints, indelible marks, where he treads the carpet. There should be indents in the air, where the bones hang heavy, where shoulders droop. He tugs at his necklace. She has the sudden, shearing urge to kiss him from shoulder to shoulder, across one blade, to the dip between, to the other side. To arrive at him. She has to put her hands under her thighs to keep from reaching out. She cannot reach him from where she sits anyway. Isn't sure he'd want to be touched just now.

Exhaustion sits in the room like another body, breathing heavily––impossible to ignore. 

“Why didn’t you come?”

He says it, almost in a whisper, posture curved towards himself. 

“What?”

Jimmy rolls the hard callus of his pinky between his thumb and forefinger, having stubbed out, and yet to start, another cigarette. 

“We talked about it, don’t you remember? In Giza? We said that you might come and finish this leg with me.”

She does remember going to Egypt. The before and during––how relentless mundanity can be, coupled strangely with adrenalin that does not turn off because the car's left the arena. Arena, room, arena, room, arena, room, until it all looks numbingly similar. The terrible boredom of it all. _I want to go,_ he said _. Go someplace, anyplace. Just go._ Egypt, the Sphinx, the sand, the open markets, the heat that made distances liquid and then solid as they walked. Pyramids stood sharp in the background whilst his hair whipped across his face in the viewfinder of her camera.

Her gaze sags. “I thought we agreed that it was too busy, jam packed.”

Jimmy looks wounded. Her heart stumbles in her chest. 

She stands up, and he reaches again to take her shoulders. Worry forms and crushes his expression. His cheeks are irritated from too quick a shave.

“Don’t, don’t get––”

“I’m sorry,” she says, helpless to say anything else. Against bleary, anxious eyes, she grasps his wrists. “I’m sorry, I––”

The molecules shift in the room. She might be fooled with this doubling. 

“Don’t say that.” Jimmy shakes her just a bit. “Don’t fucking say that again. Why in the _fuck_ would you come and say that, Emma.”


	6. Rend

A short, sharp, shock. 

A moment passes between his words. His gaze locks with hers. A stubbed out cigarette still smokes in the ashtray. He looks at her but not quite. She tightens her grip. The room is viscous liquid, like running in water, pulled the wrong way, the wrong direction. 

Temples throbbing, she does not release his wrists.

The phone, still lying on the floor, shrieks. They both jump. She has to close her eyes and wait out the ringing; it leaves a shrill echo in her ears. 

“ _Why_ didn’t you come?” Jimmy whispers, fingers pressing into her shirt, into the bunched muscles of her shoulders.

The water drains––she aches in long gone wounds. 

“Because there were other things!” She knocks his hands away. “Because I’ve never, not once come along, and that’s always been to my liking. And you, _you’ve_ never expected me to.”

She watches him in a body so taut she feels nearly removed from herself. Hurt flickers in his eyes and hardens.

“I asked you,” Jimmy says, each word soft and cutting. “In Giza, I know you remember it, Emma.” 

She remembers Munich, and she remembers Jersey, and she remembers the distinct sense that by keeping her with him, always nearby, he’d ensure some warped sense of her safety. She hauls those thoughts off. 

“You asked me, quite tentatively if memory serves, to fly out for a few dates.” Her hands rise up, fluttering amongst themselves like futile birds. “And it was certainly at the end of July. Only the last few.”

“It wasn’t.”

“It _was_.”

Jimmy swallows, and in the quiet, she hears it clearly. Even over her rabid heartbeat, she hears it, over every objection that floods her mind. A muscle twitches in his jaw.

The phone splits the room. She has never felt more animosity towards a piece of plastic and metal before; she clenches her jaw for the endless seconds of ringing.

Jimmy cannot contain whatever flares his nostrils. “And Sicily? What about then? Why not then?”

“Why not then?” She presses a hand to her forehead, to contain what threatens to spill out; the sharp stick of tears, the working of her throat. “Because it was a holiday, Jimmy. There was no set timetable, nobody even knew when you could get back to England. Do you wish I’d gone there instead? Do you imagine I went to Rhodes with the express desire to bring you some kind of pain?”

“You left me.”

She matches her teeth together carefully, deliberately, down to the molars. Her head throbs; she’d pinned her plaits too tightly to her scalp. Emma closes her eyes, and swallows, and searches for language that’s abandoned her, a patience obscured by interior weather. 

“I don’t know who it is exactly,” she says, opening her eyes, finding him instantly; those faintly tilted eyes swathed in their lids, “that you think you’re talking to, but it’s not the woman who would leave you, who forgets you or forsakes you––” 

The phone cuts into her sentence.

“Just a sec.”

She turns promptly on her heel, follows the black curl of the phone cord to the outlet beside the bed, shoves the table aside, and rips it from the wall with a fury that feels almost like relief. She considers chucking it out of the window but figures the plate glass would be quite expensive to replace, and they’re in a street facing room. She places the entire thing in the lowest drawer of the bedside table, on top of a phone book and a few pencils rolling about.

She walks back.

“Sorry,” she says, rubbing her forehead, and the ache behind her left eye. She gives a dry little laugh. “I couldn’t bear another one.”

A smile peeks from the corners of his mouth. Just a twitch. A pair of crinkles. A softening.

“You were very polite, darling. More polite than it deserved.”

The window unit has kicked on, humming chilly air over her bare arms. She folds her elbows into her palms, Jimmy follows the movement with his eyes. 

“My coming or not coming.” She shrugs weakly. “It’s immaterial. I’m not a talisman.”

“No.” Jimmy shakes his head slowly. “No, you’re not.”

“But you seem to think–”

“I think.” His eyes avert under his fringe, voiced clipped with emotion. 

He starts walking again. Stops. Turns away from her. 

“I wish you’d gone anywhere but there,” Jimmy says with such quiet viciousness it obliterates. “I’d have taken your place in an instant, in any instant.”

She bites her top lip to keep tears from slipping over her lower lids, and releases the skin slowly.

She looks up, at such a steep angle it strains the tiny muscles behind her eyes. There is no possibility of taking a walk, not in the rainstorm underway, and no possibility of jetting back to England and finding familiar footing in rooms she knows, no possibility he’d even want to either. The tour was the point, to get back and connect with them––the kids camped out in wind and rain, baking in the noonday sun, some stoned, some hiding their tape recorders, all wanting the music. And Jimmy, always wanting to play his very best. Even knowing all this, eyes aching, her toes scrunching and releasing, she finds herself not knowing. 

She leaves her language where it is.

Emma’s open palm meets damp orange cotton when she slides it between his arm and side; he’s breathing so hard. She unsnaps the top two buttons of his shirt and finds the swath of his chest hair, the flushed skin over his breastbone, and finally the pounding of his heart. She places her cheek once more between his shoulder blades. And she breathes. 

She’s aware of her feet rooted on the floor, of their breaths coming together, of each one coming slower and deeper. The thump of her heart comes slower; his too, in the soft middle of her palm. Jimmy reaches behind for her other arm and wraps it around himself, threading his fingers with both her hands––four fists nested. A tenderness that makes her shut her eyes and hide herself in his shirt. The curled ends of his hair mingle at her forehead, in the pale pink flowers clustered on the yoke of his shirt.

“You remember what I told you? About the forest and the stairs. I am here, _with_ you.” She presses her consonants and syllables, her preposition, herself, down to the orange cotton. “You are never a stranger to me.” 

Jimmy pulls her more tightly into this backwards hold. Into the long curve of his body.

“You have only to tell me,” she says to his back, humid breath collecting. “And I’ll know.”


	7. Hinge

“The connection wasn’t very good.”

He tenses as he says it. She exhales, slow and measured, and feels Jimmy return the same breath. 

“What connection?”

“From Greece.” Jimmy tightens his fists over hers and loosens them in another exhale. “I couldn’t understand Richard at first, kept asking him to repeat himself. I kept on…”

She rubs her cheek into his shirt, “Kept on what?”

Jimmy hesitates, and lets it go in one long, trembling breath. “I kept on asking to speak with you, for him to put you on, over and over. I didn’t understand that you couldn’t.”

She holds him.

After a moment, Jimmy ventures a question.

“A fruit truck picked you up, yes?”

She nods.

“I think…” He must be sliding his bottom lip between his teeth, expression crimped. “I think I must’ve lost my patience with a nurse, asking for you.”

She pulls a weak smile. “They’ve likely dealt with that before.”

Jimmy hums, a deep sound from his chest; his head drops and she feels the movement, feels his hair tickle her head. 

“I could not do anything.”

She squeezes her eyes, her face crumpling. “Of course you couldn’t.”

“But I mean I,” he stumbles, then catches his words. “I meant, I mean. I could not do anything but watch you suffer.”

She runs her thumbs over his bent fingers. And deliberately takes another breath until he follows.

“Some things aren’t there to be done with.” She finds her voice hushed yet loud; the rain has stopped. 

“Aren’t they?”

“They happen, they are. There’s not…” The window unit is on again, sending goosebumps over her sweaty skin. She burrows against Jimmy’s back. “What I mean is, you are no less for them happening.”

Jimmy unwinds their arms and turns around. He holds her face in both hands, fingertips laid over the arches of her hair. Out of tired eyes a remembered bruise gleams. A vulnerability.

“You are here with me,” he says in a low voice, weighing each word.

“I am.”

“And I am here with you.”

She smiles faintly. “I want you to be.”

Jimmy draws out the long bobby pins securing her hair, and places them in the pockets of his shirt, the kinds that begin at the piping and appear seamlessly. Pin by pin, plait by plait, he carefully combs out her hair until the whole of it’s untethered down her hips. She finds her lids heavy, lowered with each gentle tug of his fingers at her scalp. Only he knows her like this. 

“Is there a bathtub here?”

Her eyes flutter open when one of his hands leaves her. 

“Yes, but I can't find the…” Jimmy makes a pulling motion. “Might have to call down and get a new one.”

Her smile grows up her cheeks. “I’m afraid I can’t allow that goddamn phone to be plugged back in just yet.”

Crinkles pleat the outside corners of his eyes. 

Emma finds the stopper hidden behind a small mound of toilet paper under the sink. 

Mint green tile refracts and shimmers the water’s reflection. The towels are pale and fluffy in the way only posh hotel towels can be - blankets masquerading as towels. 

“My gran,” she says, sunk in between his bent legs, hair thick with suds. Back to chest. “She used to lay everything out for me, toothbrush and hairbrush and towel, and she’d come and check that I’d got all the soap out of my hair.”

Jimmy makes circles in her scalp. “How old were you, darling?”

“Must’ve been about five or so, very interested in bubbles more than the actual bathing.”

Jimmy hums and takes her against his upper arm, fingers splayed at her hip, and cups water in his free hand. Her eyes sink closed. Liquid warmth flows from her forehead. 

“And now?”

She smiles, her face glistening with water.

“I like all of it.”

Everything smells faintly of oranges while Jimmy asks after the cats, after the LP she’s cutting, the rhythm of splicing one sound seamlessly to the next, the phenomena of going deaf to certain tracks after constant listening. The push to get it done. 

Everything is misty and fogged from the hot water he adds every now and again. 

He washes her arms, salving them with creamy soap, then under her breasts, and over her stomach. There is an unnamed wonder in watching his hands shape and work over her body, to the moments when, glancing over her shoulder, she witnesses his concentration. 

Jimmy twists her hair and places it over her shoulder, where the ends spread in the water, darkest brown from being wet, floating and weightless. 

He begins washing her back. 

She lays one hand on his exposed knee and hitches her grip under it, to that tender hollow. Her question comes unbidden, neither accusatory nor plaintive.

“Have you been using?”

His hands stop and linger on her shoulder blades, the rag dips.

“A little, yeah.”

Jimmy wraps his hand round her chest, cupping one breast and pulling her against his chest at the same time. She wonders if he thinks she’ll leave him. 

“Come around.” She looks up at him. “Let me wash you.”

She fills her hands first with a smooth bar of soap and then with him, with the ordinary devotion of this sitting in water. Of soap to skin, hands to hair, washing and dipping, twisting the rag free. The wet rustle and ripple of the water.

Facing her, Jimmy is all dripping black hair and cheeks more thin than last year. She fingers the damp grey at his temples, twin smudges in his sideburns. His jaw comes together in a sharp hinge that she traces with a wrinkly fingertip. 

“I’m getting old,” he says sheepishly.

“Mm, well…” She smoothes the wet mass of his hair back. “It’s allowed, I think.”

She follows the rounded tip of his nose, up to his high forehead he’d always taken great pains to conceal. His eyes flutter closed at her careful touch.

“And I am, too,” she says.

Emma takes his face in her hands and guides him to rest against her breast; she cradles him there with both hands, scratching his scalp gently. His body melts with gratitude.

“Why didn’t you call me?” she asks quietly.

“Mm?”

She watches his hair slip and weave through her fingers. “When you got ill.”

Jimmy turns his face to her skin and mumbles, “Dunno. Didn’t want to worry you.”

“I wish that you had.”

Jimmy cups her breast, thumbing her puckered nipple, not so much a touch meant for sex as for him and his pensive speech, his careful words. He presses his face into her chest.

“I wish that I had, too.”

She glides lower into the water, and Jimmy shifts to put his face in the curve of her neck. The heat keeps. The light visible from the open bathroom door pours honeyed afternoon onto the floor. 

Underwater, she strokes his back, where bubbles cling to him like tiny, transparent barnacles. She follows each vertebra and the subtle mounds where his collarbone fuses to his shoulders. She lingers her kisses over them, and passes her hands affectionately down his waist and hips. Where he’s ticklish and smiles against her neck. 

She finds the small dimples above his backside. Milky skin touched by a flush and the warmth of bathwater; the vaguest hint of sun. Her lips curl at the memory of him, shirtless and pink in the sun. His breathing has melded slow and deep with hers; she moves his hair from his face and finds his eyes closed, soft in their full lower lids. 

“Tired?” she murmurs.

“Mmhm.” 

“Kiss?” she says, nose brushing his forehead. 

Jimmy sits up in the water. She sucks his lower lip gently into her mouth, following the curve with her tongue until Jimmy holds her face to have her mouth fully. He greets the inside of her cheeks, her tongue, her small groan with one of his. Long kissing, a whole act within itself. Plush and wet.

“Emmaline.”

He nuzzles her face and kisses her quickly and softly, a few times till she smiles. 

Jimmy stands from the bath and drapes a towel over his shoulders, over his arms, and over her, body pressed warm and wet. She shapes his hips in her hands and presses her damp face into his chest. Jimmy fists the towel tightly in one hand behind her back, enveloping both of them in the quiet. He places his free hand at the back of her head. She is nothing but naked with him––a makeshift grace so clean and uncluttered it almost hurts.

Jimmy rests his cheek on the wet part of her hair and breathes,

“Will you come to bed with me?”

The day has come to an indigo close; it presses against the windows, soaking everything else indigo. Jimmy insists on a Mandrax for both of them, for this sleep away from home that neither of them do particularly well. 

They rest together in rumpled, eggshell sheets, saturated with the day’s exhaustion. Her on her side, him on his, and her fingers at the back of his neck. Jimmy places one leg over both of hers and pulls her hair between them, heavy silk their bellies touch with every breath. 


	8. Calm

Morning sun shines so bright that all the surfaces it touches become silver, liquid light. 

He’s tucked her body beneath his for safe keeping. She has not slept well in so long, has not woken up with such a ravenous stomach in so long, grumbling like a small beast between them. Jimmy shakes with a laugh.

“The phone,” she says, voice smushed and raspy.

“You’ve forgiven it, have you?”

“No.” She rubs her eyes with the heel of her palm, dry-mouthed and fuzzy. “I’m just hungry.”

They eat mounds of eggs scrambled into soft curds, flecked with pepper, toast smeared with pale butter and peach jam. She stirs milk and sugar into his cup of tea, and hands it over, licking jam from her thumb. 

Emma sits cross legged on the couch, amongst tiny swallows, and tries to detect if he’s used during the night; slurred, slow speech, drooping eyes, incoherence. But there’s nothing, save their rustling sounds of breakfast: silverware to plate, cup to table, gingerly sipping, the crunchy scrape of a knife on toast.

Seated across from her, Jimmy looks rested but worn. A temporary rested, she knows. He’d told her once that he needed a place to go absolutely loony after touring, a place to safely turn himself inside out. _That’s when the ruptures start, when one is a kettle with the cork on the top_. He’s busy with another slice of toast now, bits of crumb gather in the slope of his dressing gown collar. She reaches over the table to swipe some jam from the corner of his mouth.

“Thank you, darling,” he says.

Emma nibbles her lip and takes a few more sips, holding her cup in both hands, wishing, rather foolishly, for a newspaper, for something to divert her eyes. Even a cigarette might do. She worries that she’s looking at him too much, too anxiously, too…something. She settles on a loose thread coming from the cuff of her sleeve. 

“Are you going?” Jimmy asks suddenly.

“What?” She looks at him, surprised. “Going where?”

“I dunno.” Jimmy looks at her fingers working the thread. “You just…I dunno.”

He stands just as suddenly, with that fluency he’s always had in his legs. 

“Come here.”

His words blend together in a well used fashion. _Come here_. _Come and kiss me_. 

She looks up at him, from across the coffee table, feeling the need to explain. “I wasn’t going anywhere.”

Jimmy steps towards her and bends to take her cup, catching her mouth a second later, her little gasp of surprise. He cradles her face upward. The Mandrax has worn off completely, she tastes him, tastes her own need, tastes the last, sweet bite he’s had. A low hum of satisfaction travels from him to her. She flushes deep crimson at the sound, down to her chest, where the fabric gapes. Jimmy breaks the kiss and nuzzles her reddened cheek. 

“Come here, my darling.”

He straightens and guides her to the edge of the bed. She nearly covers her naked breasts when he undresses her, a rawness in his gaze. Something like embarrassment infuses her face, for the way his body knows hers––her need and its heavy ache. 

She chances a kiss to the base of his throat, where two tendons meet, where his pulse flutters and he is fragrant and warm. Jimmy cups her bottom and presses her into his erection. 

“Emmaline,” he kisses it into her mouth and slips his long fingers between the cheeks of her ass, searching for her sex, pressing her body closer.

She whimpers and stands on her toes and breaks the searching kiss to hide her face in his shoulder. Safe there, not so open as when Jimmy plies her mouth with his tongue. She reaches in the hot space of their bellies for his cock and smoothes it against her abdomen, enormously gratified when he leaks at the tip. Jimmy penetrates her with a finger.

She looks up, red-faced and slippery on his finger. They can’t have sex like this, not standing here rocking together, with her legs beginning to cramp from being so rigid.

“Jimmy, I–”

He takes the opportunity to hold the back of her head and kiss her soundly. She wobbles but it doesn’t matter, not in his firm hold. Jimmy tugs her lips with his, uses his teeth on the swollen bottom one, like he’s trying to prove something. She almost tells him he doesn’t need to, but desire is a hard gem in her throat, glittering and precious. 

Jimmy guides her to the center of the mattress, amongst the rumpled mess of covers and sheets. Pillows tossed haphazardly against the headboard.

“Come here.”

Her hair flows over her shoulder, offering a place to hide when he tugs her onto his crossed legs. Chest to chest. His hands seek between her open thighs.

She presses her open mouth under his jaw, his swallowing throat, the silence punctuated by their sounds, his fingers slick between her thighs, almost as obscene as the greedy jut of his cock. 

“Emmaline,” he says, nudging the side of her face. “Look at me.”

She presses her face deeper into his neck, nose in the mass of his hair. Oranges. Jimmy slides his open palms under her bottom and over the backs of her thighs, holding her aloft for the penetration. 

She wants him inside, for that sweet, luscious stretch, the head of his cock nudging her womb. Urgent little sounds form and burst in the back of her throat. 

“ _Emmaline_.”

She whimpers, wriggles down but doesn’t get very far. 

“My darling.”

Jimmy removes one restraining hand to cup her breast, flushed and full, her nipple in a tight peak. 

“Lean back, Emma.”

She does, avoiding his gaze. But Jimmy only ducks his head to catch her nipple on his tongue, drawing her close to suckle. She’s half-stretched, aware of just how wet she’s become when he lets gravity do the rest, so slick he meets no resistance. She chokes back his name. Jimmy finishes her nipple with a few licks, flat-tongued, and guides her legs tightly around his waist. 

Fully seated, penetrated, she presses her whole face into his neck, whimpering - so full she could cry. She glances down so see the wet seal her body to his, soft on hard, pink on pink, dark pubic hair pressing to her lighter curls. 

"Emmaline," his voice is throaty, inflected with want.

She bits her lip, he’s got that slow, easy, rocking motion. The one that makes her sex clutch him in frantic little pulses. Her clit rubs against him with each roll of his hips. She can’t look up, the string tying her together would snap.

“Emmaline.” Jimmy pries her face from its shelter at his neck and cups her cheeks. 

The light comes in to paint his gaze slow and searching. His irises are big. 

"Don't hide.” He swipes his thumbs over her scarlet cheeks. "Don't hide from me."

She clutches his back, too hard, she knows. She knows her pulse flutters visibly in her throat. He sees and kisses her there. 

“I wasn’t,” she manages.

Jimmy shakes his head slowly, dark hair brushing his shoulders.

“You have been. All morning, you’ve been hiding.” 

If he’d stop that rolling motion, she could piece herself back together. Pleasure forms thickly in her blood, she wants to loll on his shoulder while it carries her away, to hide once more. She finds herself inarticulate when he’s wedged inside her, looking at her so close. He cups the back of her head, hand lodged in her hair. She wants to beg for something but she doesn’t know what; she finds herself in a great room of need. 

“Tell me,” Jimmy insists quietly.

Her eyes burn with tears. "I don't know why, why it's like this. Why it's always like this."

She could turn her entire face into his palm and usually he’d let her, but not now. Not yet. Jimmy watches her with molten eyes. 

“Because I know you. I know you. And hush, don’t say it’s terrible. It’s not terrible, Emmaline.”

The beach comes back to her. The bath comes back to her, all the ones they’ve ever taken, all the times he’s seen her naked and wet and open. Her hair trembles around his knees, puddling in bed with them. Her orgasm is close and shivering. 

Jimmy says it again and slower. _Not terrible_. _I would never mistake you for anyone else._

He brings her against his neck and the wide crest of her orgasm. She huddles, stuck to his ribs, her mouth open and noisy. He might be telling her it’s okay, whatever _it_ may be. But she senses only the hard jerk of him inside her, the sound he makes, his arms slanted around her and holding her still. The spill of his seed against the mouth of her womb. She lolls. 

“Emmaline.” His voice is supple and his hands pass over her back, again and again. 

She manages a nod. Manages not to cry out of relief and that bursting need. She is a loose fist curled against his body. She breathes in tandem with Jimmy’s passing hands; hands that pass from the indent of her waist to her shoulders, hands imbued with calm. Her thoughts come clearer.

She forget sometimes, how very much she needs touching. How very close she is to that fundamental part, that ancient and animal part. When we’ve only just been born and need, more than anything, to be touched. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, I’m nervous about posting! And once again, I’m going to intentionally honor that anxiety because Infra took me so long to write, holding me in moments that seemed impossible to wrangle into language. But I also learned and relearned things.
> 
> On the title: I don’t usually write and listen to music at the same time, but I kept Max Richter’s [Infra 5](https://youtu.be/oNLDJp83YAQ?t=706) on repeat throughout writing Pb and wanted it here––to call back. Infra can be a prefix, generally meaning below or under, and it can also be an adverb, often used in written documents to mean “see below or further on.”
> 
> On Emma’s recording scene in Call: I watched Steve Albini's videos on analog recording. I don’t understand most of it but it compels me! Oh to wear coveralls 24/7 and know technological things and also maybe be good at math. 
> 
> On the riot: In the live tape for Tampa, [Robert asks for a 15 minute break ](https://youtu.be/frZVhxDNAk0?t=1211) when the rain gets hard. I incorporated details from Keith Shadwick’s Led Zeppelin and Dave Lewis’ Led Zeppelin: The Concert File. Some of Robert’s dialogue in Tunnel comes from Robert Godwin’s compilation of LZ’s press reports. I also drew from [JP’s NYC interview after Tampa ](https://www.nyradioarchive.com/audio/WNEWFM_19770607_Page_SM_DMC.mp3).
> 
> Thank you for reading, so damn much <3


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